It’s now two years since my big Russian adventure and to celebrate the anniversary, and because I was talking about language-learning the other day, I want to talk about overcoming the Russian language barrier.
I put off my Russia trip for years. Russia was well outside my comfort zone. It’s so… Russian. It never feels quite stable enough or calm enough to go and I knew it would feel very different from my beloved Northern Europe or even Eastern Europe.
But then I thought long and hard about it and I realised the main thing putting me off was actually the language barrier. I’d never been anywhere that used a different alphabet. I don’t speak a word of the local language in 99% of the countries I’ve been to but I speak French and Spanish and I know enough tourist German to get by and other than Finnish, everything is related to one of those three. If you know tourist German, you can get by in Swedish and Norwegian and Dutch, at least enough for your long weekend away. If you speak French you can understand Italian and Romanian. Finnish was a problem but fortunately Finland is bilingual with Swedish as its second language so that was fine. Russian isn’t related to anything I’ve ever come across and it uses an alphabet I can’t read.
Well, if it was only the language that was troubling me and preventing me from going to Russia, that could be dealt with! Languages can be learned!
I started with Duolingo. I don’t think it’s the best way of learning a language – I have a friend who proudly declared that she had a 60 day streak in Polish but also in the same breath admitted sheepishly that she had no idea how to so much as say hi and introduce herself. But one thing Duolingo is quite good at is spending entire modules making you familiar with new alphabets. Of course, you end up with endless nonsense sentences and nothing you can actually use when you travel but it does teach you to decipher the letters.
A year or so before I went to Russia, I had a quick trip to Ukraine. It was cheap and it didn’t require a visa. Ukrainian also uses the Cyrillic alphabet and is a language I have no reference point for but somehow it didn’t bother me. Perhaps because I knew this was only a short half-week away rather than a once-in-a-lifetime epic. Perhaps because I’d learnt the basics of reading most of the letters by then. I did a few Duolingo lessons. I’d tried to learn the basic niceties in Russia and found long strings of Cyrillic very difficult and abandoned my attempt. But I picked it up again for Ukrainian. This time I guess I had a dim and fuzzy idea of the basics and Ukrainian is very similar to Russian but somehow I thrived in Ukrainian whereas I’d struggled endlessly in Russian. No idea why.
By the time I was preparing for my Russia trip, I’d started back on the language-learning. I still struggled. My brain is evidently not made for Russian. I even invested in a teach-yourself book and CD combi set. I might have got on better if I’d had an actual teacher. Southampton University does a Russian for beginners course and it’s my life’s ambition to join it but it’s on Ranger night. The book and CD wasn’t all that useful. I gathered that Russian syntax works very differently from any language I’ve ever tried learning before. There don’t appear to be articles – no the or a, just plain nouns. The role of to be seems to be non-existent. Phrases like “I am a doctor” become “I doctor”. I’m a trained language student; that should be a small linguistic oddity, not something insurmountable. But I just couldn’t make sense of Russian.
My trip came up at last. I’d planned it and booked it and got my visa and I still couldn’t speak Russian. My insurmountable barrier had proved far stronger than me. But I could read Cyrillic. Well, I could figure out each letter and sound out words like a four-year-old learning to read. I knew how to say good morning/day/evening/night and please and thank you and “where is…?” and that would have to do.
It turned out it would do just fine!
In general, I found that ticket machines had a button that put them in English. Human ticket sellers almost universally did not speak English but they knew what you wanted, especially if you handed over the correct amount of money and your refillable metro card and made enthusiastic faces. When I topped up my Moscow metro pay ring, I looked up the Russian for “10 trips” and wrote it on a piece of paper which I handed to the lady behind the counter.
I used Google Translate to communicate with the landladies at my apartments in Murmansk and Ekaterinburg. Hotel staff, I did find, generally spoke good English. When I got stuck outside my apartment in Murmansk, the so-kind Trainee Maria at the big hotel across the road phoned my landlady for me to explain that I was stuck outside waiting for her. And I discovered that I understand more Russian than I technically should.
On my third day in Moscow, a lady approached me at Paveletskaya metro station, the closest to my hotel, and she addressed me. I caught the word “vokzal”. That was one I’d learned in Kyiv. It means station. In context, I guessed she was asking where was the station – the mainline railway station of the same name rather than the metro station we were standing in. I can’t speak Russian. I couldn’t answer the question. But I knew what the question was. I pointed out of the window and across the road and said “over there” and then to verify that I understood what she meant and to verify that I was indeed attempting to answer the question, I made a steam train noise, to which she said “da”, which means yes. I nodded and pointed across the road again. “Vokzal. There.”
It’s hardly a long sophisticated conversation about art and politics and whatnot. But it was a huge boost to my Russian-language confidence. On the train from Ekaterinburg to Perm, the lady in the seat opposite explained how to make the bed, how to get into the bed, how to pack up ready to leave, all without a shared language, by pointing and patting and miming. But she also had a conversation with another lady on the other side of the aisle and from the few words I caught, namely “English” and “school”, I got the impression that they were chatting about how they never learned English in school and weren’t very good at school and they smiled in my direction occasionally, so I felt like I was included in the conversation and was following it, despite the fact that I mostly absolutely wasn’t.
But it was the Cyrillic that made the big difference. I read everything I see. I can’t help it. My eye is going to run over every sign, every advert, every name painted down the side of a taxi and although it was frustrating to be met with letters I have to decipher rather than letters I can just read, I was astonished to find how often I figured out the Cyrillic and found an English word hiding underneath it. A big advert for KFC (see photo above): “Ланч баскет… ok, let’s spell it out. L….A….N….SH…B…A…S…K….E….T – you’re kidding, it literally says lunch basket?”. A taxi parked on the road as I walked to the supermarket: “Такси – T… A….K….S….EE…. oh, it says taxi” and so on and so on. Of course, where it came in most useful was for reading metro maps and signs. The metro is signed in Russian and English and possibly also in a Chinese language but being able to read it, however slowly, made me so much more comfortable. It also helped that the metros in Moscow and Kyiv are almost carbon copies of each other, so I realised that I knew exactly how the Moscow one worked after my trip to Ukraine the previous year.
So those are my two biggest tips if you want to go to Russia but you’re nervous about the language barrier. Learn to read Cyrillic and don’t worry too much about putting sentences together (and go to Ukraine for a gentle easing-in).